N210 Trillion: Nigeria’s numbers problem, by Mahmud Nasir Jafar

The easiest way to rile Nigeria on the matter of public finance is to throw a number of endless zeroes at us and call it missing money. Nobody needs to explain the ledger from which it was drawn, or the accounting convention that produced it, or whether the sum describes cash that once sat in a vault. The figure alone is enough. Within an hour it has travelled through the group chats, been converted into hospitals unbuilt and roads untarred, and hardened into an article of faith no clarification can dislodge, and what follows is an instant screaming match in which the loudest participants are frequently those least equipped to read a balance sheet. This was the pattern that greeted the claim that N210 trillion had gone missing from the books of the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited, a figure roughly four times the size of the national budget, tossed around like a stale pancake until it arrived, unexamined, at a Senate committee hearing.

I cannot be the only Nigerian disappointed that a farce of a figure travelled that far before anybody interrogated its arithmetic. My consolation is that the hearing served as a lecture, delivered by a man, Bala Wunti, who understood both the numbers and the industry that produced them well enough to take the chamber through the reasoning rather than around it. The N210 trillion, he explained, appears nowhere in the 2023 Audited Financial Statements of the company. It was manufactured by adding N107 trillion in receivables to N103 trillion in payables, which is to say by adding money owed to the company to money owed by the company and presenting the sum as a hole. Anyone who has run a provisions shop in Wuse market knows that what your customers owe you and what you owe your suppliers belong on opposite sides of the ledger.

The second layer of the confusion is structural, and here institutional memory is worth more than any spreadsheet. Following the Petroleum Industry Act, the company began operating two distinct accounts, a shareholders’ account and a commercial account, with NAPIMS, now NUIMS, running the former and the corporate headquarters the latter. Because NUIMS remains a subsidiary, its inflows and outflows must also reflect on the main account. Someone unfamiliar with that architecture, encountering one transaction represented in two places, would reasonably suspect duplication or concealment, while someone who has spent decades inside the industry recognises consolidation for what it is. The distance between those readings is the distance between a national scandal and an accounting footnote.

The committee itself has been more careful than the headlines it generated. Senator Ibrahim Dankwambo, who chairs the review of the audited statements, told journalists that the committee never described the money as missing, that its concern was with sums it considered unaccounted for and unexplained, and that it had found no evidence of money disappearing from the books. Unaccounted for, receivable, payable, outstanding obligation and missing carry five different legal and financial consequences, and public discussion flattened all of them into a single accusation. An entry requiring reconciliation is evidence that two institutions have not sat in the same room with the same documents, nothing more.

Which brings me to the most damning revelation of the episode, and it has nothing to do with money. Wunti admitted, in his own words, that there has been insufficient closer engagement between our public institutions. A discrepancy of this magnitude should never have reached the floor of the National Assembly, much less the front pages, before the relevant auditors and accounting officers had sat together to reconcile their figures. That is the purpose of an audit query, an internal instrument exchanged between technical people who speak the same language, so that the public receives conclusions rather than the raw material of confusion. Without that exchange, the country is handed a number it cannot interpret and invited to have a nervous breakdown over it.

We have been here before, and the failure to learn is what makes the repetition intolerable. When Sanusi Lamido Sanusi announced that twenty billion dollars had vanished from the corporation’s coffers, the country went through the same cycle of outrage and the same certainty that a final reckoning had arrived. Then Senator Ahmed Makarfi pressed him at a Senate committee hearing and that claim could not be substantiated in the terms in which it had been made. What survived was a feeling rather than a fact, and it has outlived every reconciliation exercise conducted since. A decade later we are still paying interest on it, with a fresh instalment now added to the debt.

None of this argues for the Senate to abandon its oversight function. Nigerians have every historical reason to be suspicious of what happens to petroleum revenue, and a legislature that does not interrogate the accounts of the national oil company is failing at the job the constitution assigns it. My argument is that oversight conducted through the newspapers amounts to theatre, and every unsubstantiated figure in circulation devalues the currency of the next legitimate finding, so that when a real irregularity surfaces the country greets it with the same exhausted shrug it gave the last one.

What the Senate owes the public now is a reconciliation conducted on the record, following the documents wherever they lead, insulated from political pressure in either direction, and concluded with a finding ordinary citizens can read. The analyst Ike Onwuachu made this point in his assessment of the hearing, arguing that the question should be settled by transparent reconciliation rather than competing narratives, and that reading numbers off a balance sheet without understanding the historical transactions and operational structures behind them is an incomplete exercise. A balance sheet summarises decisions taken over years under particular constraints, and anyone who reads it without that history is reading a foreign language with a pocket dictionary.

This is why the calibre of the person answering the questions matters as much as the calibre of the questions. Watching Wunti take a Senate committee through receivables, payables, subsidiary consolidation and the post-Petroleum Industry Act architecture, without condescension and without evasion, I thought about how rare that combination has become in our public life. He did not perform indignation, nor hide behind the complexity of his own sector, which is the route most technocrats take when cornered. He explained, patiently and in sequence, until the arithmetic was visible to people who do not do arithmetic for a living. That is what institutional memory looks like at the service of the public rather than deployed against it.

Nigeria is not short of people who can recite figures. We are short of people who can explain them, and shorter still of people who will stand before a hostile room and do the explaining when silence would be safer. Our numbers problem is really a problem of interpretation, of institutions that do not speak to one another, of a public sphere in which magnitude has replaced meaning as the measure of importance. Fixing it requires the temperament on display at that hearing, a willingness to reconcile before announcing, to distinguish before accusing, and to teach before defending. A leader of that description is what Nigeria has been looking for, and the search will continue long after this particular trillion has been forgotten.

Mahmud Nasir Jafar, a public affairs analyst, writes from Life Camp, Abuja.